Professor of History…with a liberal agenda, perhaps? I think we need to clean out our colleges and universities and get rid of the dead weight socialists/marxists/communists polluting the faculty.

Exhibit B:

Just another whining, everything is bad, liberal college teacher that cannot think or reason past his tunnnel vision outlook of life.GET A LIFE COLLEGE TEACHER!!!!

Exhibit C:

David Noon… you’re just another liberal leftist lunatic with a gripe at all your classmates who did an MBA and went on to become succesful managers and CEOs… while you sat and plodded your way around the library hoping your leftist ideals would manifest themselves in a divine form and save you from your miserable self…

such a pity… why dont you go to some socialist paradise and spout your moonbat nonsense there.

Hell you might even be made VP

And Exhibit D:

Another liberal inspired rant from a hopelessly narrow minded commie foot solder in a state funded position. YOU PEOPLE!

On another subject-when will so called objective minded journalists turn their attentions to investigating all of the college and university teachers and professors who have made a practice of exploiting vulnerable young women in grades for sex exchange?

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.

The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer.

Read the rest. As far as I can understand, the CIA flipped a Swiss family that was acting as a conduit for nuclear know how and equipment to reach Libya and Iran. This family (a father and two sons) were part of the Khan nuclear smuggling network. When they ran short on funds, they decided to cooperate with the CIA and send faulty equipment to the Libyans and the Iranians. Swiss prosecutors assembled a large amount of evidence on the family, and planned to prosecute. The US government was extremely reluctant to have the details of the relationship out in the open (the files also contained sensitive data about how to construct parts of a nuclear weapons operation), and heavily pressured the Swiss government to either turn over the files or destroy them. The Swiss, apparently, have decided on the latter.

I guess… um… good job? You hate to see the destruction of evidence (both from a legal and a historical perspective), but I can’t argue with the purpose behind the CIA’s activity, or with its desire to keep elements of that relationship secret. Moreover, there should certainly be some incentive for members of nuclear smuggling networks to cooperate with authorities. It’s probably good that the Tinner family isn’t prosecuted; future cooperative individuals might be dissuaded if they knew that cooperation would produce a paper trail that might lead to home country prosecution. The ideal outcome would perhaps have been for the Swiss to grant some form of immunity, and to have kept the documents under lock and key after they had been examined by nuclear weapons inspectors.

All that said, this really does fit in the Bush administration approach to non-proliferation, which is based on the principle of unilateral action (intelligence and military operations combined with intimidation). I suspect it’s not accidental that the administration prefers destruction of the information to transfer of it to the relevant non-proliferation organizations. While that approach may pay some dividends at some times, it’s not a good long term strategy; international non-proliferation efforts have a remarkable record of success in the last forty years.

24 hours ago one of McCain’s chief economic advisers announced that talk of serious economic trouble was all the fault of Barack Obama frightening everybody for crass political gain. This morning McCain wants a 9/11-style commission to investigate why greedy Eastern financiers have been allowed to rob America’s workers blind.

McCain on MSNBC: “I was talking about the fundamentals of America, which is the workers, their productivity, their innovation, their incredible performance for many, many years. And what I was saying is and it’s clear if you look at my remarks and that is that Wall Street has betrayed us. They’ve broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen and the worker. And workers are paying a very heavy price while a lot of them are not only emerging unscathed but some of them are left with packages of a hundred million dollars or so. This is a result of excess and greed and corruption. And that’s exactly what is plaguing Americans today. And we got to fix it and we’ve got to update our regulatory system. We have to have a 9/11 commission to find out what went wrong and to fix what’s going to happen in the future so this never ever happens again. And as president, I guarantee you, it will never happen again.”

I’m surprised the Cross of Gold wasn’t in there too.

Tomorrow: John McCain marries Rudy Giuliani in a Wiccan river ceremony and names Bootsy Collins Secretary of Health and Human Services.

She’s been on a roll lately, but IB’s take on the new Richard Cohen column is one of her better lines:

He’s kinda like a kid who, upon discovering that there is no Santa Claus, attempts to locate the precise moment in time that Jolly St. Nick ceased to exist.

I suppose some people might be inclined to be charitable since he’s seen the light. But I’m inclined to simply agree with Brad DeLong, who correctly notes that “Richard Cohen’s fantasy McCain never existed–save in the mind of Richard Cohen, the journalist-as-puppy.” Everything unsavory about McCain’s current campaign, including the lying and flip-flops, were perfectly evident during the 2000 primaries. As Somerby recently put it:

For most of us, an obvious thought will come to mind when a person walks away from his stated principles; we’ll think he was perhaps pretending when he claimed these as his principles. In fact, McCain misstated the truth all through Campaign 2000, about George W. Bush and Al Gore. He had a major race-man running his South Carolina campaign; he made robo-calls about Bush in Michigan, then lied to the press corps about them. But the press corps was on this greatest saint’s side, and so they chose not to notice.

And precisely because of the bogus narrative of Saint McCain the press so carefully cultivated, these too-little-too-late departures from the Straight Talk Express are unfortunately unlikely to have much effect.

Increasingly, that seems to be the choice. The weird insistence on sticking to the obviously false claim about saying “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere is beginning to look like a pattern. Tonight at a fundraiser in Ohio, she re-told an already debunked story about her teleprompter not working during her VP acceptance speech. That story was fed to righty blogs by McCain’s people on the night of the speech, and flew around the world a couple of times before being definitively shot down by a bunch of first-hand witnesses, who were watching the teleprompter during the speech.

The possibilities seem to be:

(1) There was a slight glitch in the teleprompter at some point that was so subtle that none of the journalists following the speech on the teleprompter noticed it, but Palin noticed it, mentioned it to the McCain people, and now two weeks later is still making a mountain out of a molehill because she’s enjoying the hero worship this kind of thing engenders.

(2) She got nervous during the speech and thought the teleprompter was malfunctioning at some point when it wasn’t. Otherwise, same as (1).

(3) She’s a sociopath and made the whole thing up.

I guess we’ll find out, especially if she becomes president . . .

At least there are some signs that some of the media are beginning to get uncomfortable with the possibility of somebody who may be sort of nuts may get to run the country without ever holding a press conference or answering a real question from a real journalist.

“The important thing is she’s vetoed a half a billion dollars in earmark projects — far, far in excess of her predecessor and she’s given money back to the taxpayers and she’s cut their taxes, so I’m happy with her record,” McCain said.

Um, the answer to all of these would be “no.”

(1) Palin vetoed $231 million in 2007; many of the items were renewed for the 2008 budget, which Palin chopped by $268 million. Sure, that might look like $500 million, but when you consider that funding was restored for many of those projects, while others were vetoed two years in a row, you come up with a significantly smaller figure. And when you consider the fact that Palin signed the two largest state budgets in Alaskan history — the latter of which was plumped by a windfall revenue tax on the oil companies — the math looks even sillier. Speaking of which….

(2) Palin has not “given back money to the taxpayers” because the state does not collect significant amounts of revenue from taxpayers. We have no state income tax; what little the state does receive from ordinary schlubs comes from regressive taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and gambling. In fact, however, he vast proportion of state revenue comes from the oil companies and the federal government. When the legislature passed an energy rebate this summer, giving eligible state residents a one-time $1200 payment, they were able to do so only because of rising oil prices and because of the new, higher taxes the state had levied on resource extraction. It’s simply not true that the state “returned” money to the people.

(3) While it’s true that the state suspended its 8-cent gas tax for a year, it’s also true that Alaskans pay the highest gas prices in the country right now. And while gas prices have dropped in recent weeks, the reduction has pretty much tracked with the national declines — which is to say, the suspension of the gas tax has been, as everyone who knows what they’re talking about will tell you a nice gift to the oil companies.

Cathy Young has an attempted feminist defense of Sarah Palin (endorsed, natch, by Ann Althouse.) The fundamental problem with the argument is that there’s no inherent value to having lots of people call themselves feminists, per se. The point is to get people to endorse feminist principles, and on this count Palin’s record is utterly dismal, at least the way most people would define feminism. Young and Althouse are welcome to try to argue that feminism can encompass forcing (poor) women to carry pregnancies to term, imposing a effective tax on rape victims, and interpreting laws in ways that make it easier for businesses to pay women less for the same work (even if your interpretation is manifestly contrary to the purpose of the statute and not compelled by its language.) But somehow I’m guessing most feminists aren’t going to find the Palin vision of feminist policy very attractive.

It’s also unclear in what way the pork-begging, culturally reactionary Palin in any way represents “can-do” feminism free from government assistance, as Young claims. Is it perhaps the substantial per diem she gets from the government to help her feed her family at home? Does it only count as government support if you aren’t already affluent?

What’s amazing about this is that I figured that McEvenWorse and Palin would at some point permanently change the “Bridge to Nowhere” howler to some technically accurate but grossly misleading formulation, like “I stopped the Bridge to Nowhere [but won’t tell you about my erstwhile strong support or the fact that I never opposed to building it with federal money].” But no — they’re happy to just keep telling outright lies about it. They probably think that the media will just drop the subject — and, alas, they’re probably right.

Ned Yost has been fired, with his team tied for the NL wild card spot and 13 days left in the season. Can’t think of any precedent for something like this off the top of my head. I don’t follow the Brewers at all so I have no idea what’s going on.

Denver Broncos Coach Mike Shanahan was clearly having a Herm Edwards moment Sunday. You play to win the game, but Shanahan’s decision to go for a 2-point conversation for a victory over the Chargers instead of an extra point to tie the score should teach a few other coaches a lesson: stop being so conservative.

The Broncos’ rookie receiver Eddie Royal beat San Diego safety Clinton Hart to score a two-point conversion and give Denver a victory with 29 seconds left in the game.NFL coaches are famously reliant on charts that prescribe when to take timeouts, when to kick extra points, sometimes even when to kick field goals or to go for it on fourth down. But Shanahan’s channeling of a riverboat gambler flew in the face of every chart and every shred of logic.

If he goes for the gimme extra point, he almost certainly sends the Broncos into overtime. Last season, N.F.L. kickers missed just 13 extra points in 1,178 attempts. Then again, he probably had little faith in a defense that had yielded three second-half touchdowns.Just twice before had teams converted successful 2-point attempts while going for a victory since the play was added in 1994. And last season, N.F.L. teams converted just 30 of 61 attempts, a paltry .492 rate of success. Shanahan’s own career record with the Broncos before Sunday was only slightly better — 15 of 28 (.535).

“I just felt like it was a chance for us to put them away,” Shanahan said.

Ummmm . . . how tough is this to figure out? If the NFL average for converting 2-pointers is 49%, and Shanahan’s average is 53%, and you’re in a game where the teams have scored 75 points so far, and your opponent’s defense is exhausted and demoralized because for among other reasons the refs have just blown a call that should have won the game for them, and you assume that the odds of winning in overtime are 50%, then how does going for two fly in the face of “every shred of logic,” as opposed to being, say, the obviously correct decision?

My favorite aspect of this is how the writer gets the statistical analysis totally wrong, and therefore concludes that going for it is sort of crazy, but then recommends that coaches ought to make lots of similarly crazy decisions because this one happened to work. I mean how many ways can you be wrong in 200 words?

Still, props to Shanahan for going against the conventional wisdom, when failure would have gotten him excoriated by every TMAWS in America.